Mic Volume Levels?

J

jb2004

New member
I record at home using Cubase, Audition, and Ableton Live, and aside from MIDI, everything I record goes through an MXL 2003 Condenser Mic. This is then sent to my Behringer Eurorack 602A Mixer, and then into my Computer. The question I have is this: You obviously don't want a hissing noise in your recordings, so what is a good volume/decibel level mics should be used at? In Audition for example, the decibel reading can go from 0 all the way to -72, but when I record, the "hissing" the mic picks up during silence is usually around -30 to -40. Is this adequate? or should "silence" levels be even lower. I should also note that although my room is not soundproofed, I do not believe much of this hissing is coming from the surrounding environment.

Thanks,

j
 
You could use a gate. This would produce absolute silence when no signal is going through the mic. When the audio signal is loud enough to trigger the gate, the gate will open. Your hiss will still be there, but -30,-40 your source should mask any noise. I haven't used MXL, but I think that hiss might be from the 602A mic pres turned up to high.
 
I've tried using a gate, but I just don't like the end result. I find that sometimes it misses subtleties. I've also tried altering the volume and gain levels on the mixer, but it seems like as soon as the hissing is successfully removed, the volume level us much too low for recording. I wanted to get rid of the hissing altogether, but if you feel that a hiss at -30 to -40 db is ok, then I can definitely live with that.

Thanks a lot for your help,

j
 
It depends what your hearing. I wouldn't rely so much on the visual info, but on what your hearing. If what your hearing is unacceptable, it's unacceptable. True setting the threshold on a gate can be tricky. There might be gain boosted way up somwhere else on the mixer, like an aux return or fader on another channel strip being fed to the main mix. Turn everthing down except the channel your using this might quiet things down a bit. Do this just to make sure it's not an accumulative thing over many channels.
 
I turned down all other volume and gain knobs on the mixer, and that most definitely helped! The other thing I noticed is that whether my mixer is on or off, and whether the line into my computer is in or not, the decibel level during "silence" with the mic off hovers around -60. This gets raised to about -45 when I have the mic on at a reasonable volume now. So it looks like something within my computer (soundcard?) is causing some sort of sound or hissing. Do you know if there is any way to get rid of this type of sound? I did try changing the computer's mixer levels, and this gets rid of the hissing, but again makes the recording levels much too low.

Thanks again for all the help,

j
 
Glad that helped. The fact that you can reduce that noise level with the computer mix level makes me think cheap sound card. I do not record with PC so I can't recommend one, or even if that's the problem, but I'm sure there's some bright boys here on the forum that can help you from here.
 
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